


Women! Wanted Zine Flash Fiction

by vannahfanfics



Category: One Piece
Genre: Drabble Collection, Drabbles, Gen, Oneshot collection, Zine: Women! Wanted, oneshots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 3,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23975440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vannahfanfics/pseuds/vannahfanfics
Summary: A collection of my works that were created as part of the Women! Wanted Zine's flash fiction challenges and my official zine pieces!
Relationships: Baby 5 & Donquixote Doflamingo, Nami & Nojiko (One Piece)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Women! Wanted Zine: Flash Fics





	1. Praise

Baby 5's heart pounded in her tiny chest as she stood wedged between Corazon's and Joker's fluffy feathered coats. Though one may normally find the soft, downy feathers embracing, their little tickles felt like ants crawling up and down her arms, digging their tiny pincers into her skin with relish. Baby 5 straightened her spine as she felt Doflamingo lean over her to huskily growl his order.

“Now, Baby…” The cooing tone of his voice dripped like venom-laced honey from his tongue, “You know what you need to do. Are you going to let that man disrespect us and do nothing about it?” She didn't see it, but she knew his sharp gaze hidden behind those glasses shifted to the cowering, sniveling man huddling in the end of the alleyway. He had his back pressed against the dirty brick wall, kneeling on knees that could no longer support his weight as all the starch had melted from the joints. Pleads and prayers tumbled from his lips in senseless babbles. From her position at the entrance to the alley flanked by the two towering men, she could see the moonlight refracting on the tears spilling down his cheeks. They painted two white lines from his watering eyes, like daggers' edges.

Baby 5’s lip wobbled. She ought not feel sorry for him; why should she? He had it coming. It was his own fault for serving Joker and Corazon meat that was undercooked. He was obviously trying to kill them by serving them raw meat! Baby 5 couldn't stand for her superiors to suffer such an insult! And…

_If I kill him, they'll praise me!_

A twisted smile deformed her red lips as she transformed her right hand into a pistol and raised it. The gun cocked at her mental command, and there was not a tremble in the silver end of the barrel as she trained her sights on the middle of his sweat-slicked forehead. The incoherent babble pouring from his mouth turned to deranged screeches and screams. Suddenly, the man lunged forward on his hands and knees to frantically crawl on his hands and knees toward her, groping for the hem of her purple dress. Baby, more on reflex than will, fired the gun before his fingers could grab hold of the hem. Red blood and brain matter splashed across the cobblestone floor of the alley, and gave the worn, faded red bricks of the walls a fresh coat of paint. The man slumped in a heap before her small feet. His face was still drawn taut in an agonized, piggish squeal that rang in her ears. She wondered if that’s how livestock sounded when they were slaughtered.

Baby jumped slightly as Doflamingo's massive hand curled around her comparably tiny shoulder, digits squeezing into the skin. He had a slight whistle in his breath as he drew it in through the Cheshire cat grin marking his face.

“Very well done, Baby. What a good little girl you are.”


	2. Independence

_Swish-swish. Swish-swish._ The rough straw of Koala's broom scratched against the grimy stone floor of the servants' quarters as she swept left and right, driving the dust into a pile to be trashed like all filth was meant to be. She methodically worked her way through her workspace until she reached the last room on the hall; it had recently been vacated, as the slave who once inhabited it was now a discarded corpse being fed upon by the fishes in the nearby bay. Koala made sure that the smile was bright on her face as she swept the empty room. Soon one of the older maids would come by to scrub the bloodstains from the floor, and there could not be one speck of dirt.

As she passed the pile of straw that served as the slaves' beddings, she spied something peeking out from underneath. She fervently cast a glance at the door and listened; no approaching footsteps. She crouched down to snatch whatever it was up. It was a crumpled slip of paper with letters on them. Koala's reading level was only rudimentary, so took the word written on it one letter at a time.

_I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-C-E._

Koala stared hard at the scrap of paper, trying desperately to sound out the word in her head. It was utterly foreign. Soon the other maid was lugging a pail of soapy water into the room; it sloshed over the wooden edges to spill onto the stones in scattered puddles, but it didn’t matter, as the whole floor would be wet soon. The blood was already leaching into the sudsy liquid, trailing away in thin pink streams.

“What do you have there, Koala?” the maid asked as she wiped her damp hands on her apron. The young girl held out the strip of paper so she could read it. The maid gasped in horror and snatched it out of her hands only to dunk it in the bucket of mop water. Koala wailed in dismay and ran to the bucket, peering down into the rippling water to watch the thin paper collapse in clumps and sink to the bottom.

“What did it say?” she demanded, looking up at the maid with wide eyes. “What did it say? Was it bad?” The maid only sighed and grabbed the scrub brush from the water, then kneeled to begin scraping away the dried blood.

“I said ‘independence,’” she answered after a while, in a very low voice. _In-dee-pen-dense._ Koala committed the pronunciation to memory. The brush scraped across the floor harshly, flooding the surrounding water with more pink. “It’s a synonym for ‘freedom.’” Koala’s wide eyes looked back in the bucket of soapy water.

_Freedom… Independence._

She watched the blood streams curl in wisps around her toes as they flooded through the water. She had once heard that tears and blood are the currency of freedom. Looking down at the puddle of water slowly being dyed red, she only then realized how true that was.


	3. Smile for Me

“You’d be a lot prettier if you smiled.”

What woman didn’t _loathe_ those words? Jewelry Bonney sure as hell did. Here she was, one of the thirteen renowned Supernovas and terror of the South Blue, and some lout on the street had the _gall_ to patronize **_her_** with that faux sweet tone of voice? He had some balls on him, that was for sure, sidling over to use a beefy arm and muscle her against the brick wall of the café she had just exited. She abhorred the fact she had to crane her neck to glare up into his ugly mug. The townsfolk and her crew alike fearfully kept their distance, as the bloodlust burning in her eyes was a clear indication that she was contemplating just how she would like to _murder_ the bastard.

The tendons in her neck flexed taut as he grabbed her roughly by the chin and stretched the plush of her cheeks so that the corners of her lips drew upward into a gross mocking of a smile. His fingers playfully pushed into the soft skin of her face as he sneered. “There, now, doll. Such a pretty little thing like you shouldn’t go scowlin’ around. You’ll get frown lines in that pretty skin of yours.” His other hand began to tease at the ends of her pink hair, curling the tresses around his fingertip- that is, until his index finger was no longer there, but instead twitching on the concrete at Bonney’s feet with blood oozing from the clean laceration from her dagger.

With a bestial howl, the lug reared back, the hand that was once squeezing her cheeks now enclosed around his knuckle joint that was spurting blood. “You bitch! I’ll kill you!” he screamed and lunged to wrap his good hand around her throat. Bonney jammed her dagger right through his palm, using brute force to push his hand back until the tip of the dagger was pushing into the plush of his scruffy cheeks. His eyes were blown wide now with fear, and his entire body frozen like a meek rabbit in the jaws of a hungry wolf. Bonney fluttered her eyelashes as she pouted dourly. “What are you thinking, you insane hussie?!”

“Little ol’ me?” she tutted with false innocence. “Oh, I was just thinking of how handsome you’d be if you smiled.”

So, Bonney gave him a smile he could wear forever.


	4. Neverending Storm

Nami exhaled deeply as thunder rolled once more overhead. It had been rumbling in the sky for several hours. The wooden walls trembled and groaned with every boom. Every few seconds, a bright flash of lightning illuminated the small room and the stacks upon stacks of maps.

“I wonder when the storm will end…”

The rain battered the window insistently while the wind yowled. From her seat at her desk, Nami watched the clear water stream over the surface like a cascading waterfall. Above her head, the raindrops battered the roof tiles like bullets from an artillery gun, so loudly that she thought they would come crashing through any moment. It was the height of the afternoon, but the blanket of dark storm clouds was so thick in the lower atmosphere that not one beam of sunlight could fall to Earth; it was dark as night out there and in Nami's room-slash-prison-cell, save for the small bubble of light formed by the flickering lantern and the occasional flash of lightning.

Nami hopped down from the hard wooden chair to approach the window. The water was pouring like thick syrup down the glass. The image of the courtyard of Arlong Park was so distorted that she could almost pretend that it was not Arlong Park at all, that she was in someplace else far away from the vile Fishmen. Someplace where she was _free_.

Nami’s hand rose to curl around her tattoo as it began to burn horribly. She clenched her teeth as her fingers dug into the skin of her shoulder, pressing red crescent moons into the flesh. Her shaking, teary brown eyes stared hard down at her right hand, which was smudged with ink and blood. The tears dropped down from her cheeks to land on her upturned palm, and the clear drops flooded with the black-red colors.

“When will it end, Bellemere? When will it _end_?”

A series of increasingly loud thumps in the hallway made Nami fly back to her desk, chest heaving with wild breaths as she snatched up the half-drawn maps she had scattered in fearful fervor. Biting her lip to contain encroaching sobs, she busied her pen across the grid-lined page. Her eardrums rang with the slow creaking of the door. A thin line of light speared over the floor, remaining there for agonizingly long seconds, before it began to shrink. As the door clicked shut the light dissolved into the darkness again. Nami breathed a quiet sigh of relief and slumped down into the chair, holding a hand over her burning shoulder all the while.

The storm continued to rage through the long night, until the sun finally came to drive it away.


	5. All I've Got Now

The spacious kitchen of what was once Bellemere’s hilltop cottage was silent save for Nami’s pathetic sniffles. She tried to be tough and not cry, but that was hard to do as every gentle dab of the antiseptic-doused cotton ball against the mosaic of bruises and scratches of the left side of her face. Nojiko’s face was stoic as she tended to Nami’s freshest wound, courtesy of Arlong. It was too long ago that Nojiko was nursing the red, heated skin surrounding her shoulder tattoo as it raged with bacterial infection.

“Nojiko…” she murmured after what seemed an eternity of silence. Her sister’s eyes, calm and lidded, switched from the cotton ball to her own teary orbs. Nami’s tongue nervously swiped over her busted lip before meekly continuing, “are you sure you don’t hate me?” The rest of the village despised her with every fiber of their beings, and Nami couldn’t blame them; in their view, she had selfishly become employed by her mother’s murderer and warden to the prison that was now Cocoyashi. It was easier if they hated her, because then Arlong wouldn’t use them to punish Nami so readily, but damn did it hurt. Her heart twisted into the fabric of her shirt as her heart contorted in misery. “Tell me the truth, Nojiko,” she begged as her sister remained tortuously silent.

“Dummy,” Nojiko sniffed in disdain before resuming her medical treatment. “Of course I don’t hate you. We’re family, and family’s got to stick together. Bellemere taught us that. I couldn’t hate you even if I tried…” Her final statement was soft, with the hint of a smile on her lips, and Nami knew she was speaking the truth. Nami sighed as her entire body sagged into the rickety chair with relief.

“Yeah… She did,” she responded wistfully. She stared at the bottle of antiseptic resting on the wooden table. Suddenly, Nojiko dropped the cotton ball to grab Nami in a firm hug, and the redhead was alarmed to feel her shaking. Wet tears plopped down on the skin on her neck.

“You have to stay alive, Nami. You’re all I’ve got now. My only family,” Nojiko sniffled. Nami smiled tersely as she patted her sister’s quivering back.

“I promise. Like you said… We have to stick together.”


	6. Shirahoshi's Fairy Tale

Shirahoshi’s blue eyes gazed fixedly at the illustration of a knight and princess galloping through a field of seagrass on seahorseback that decorated the final page of her picture book. Her hands glazed over the waxen pages, tracing along the thick inky lines with quiet rapture. It was her favorite image within her most favorite fairy tale book, which detailed a princess being rescued from a tower and spirited away by a prince. Shirahoshi didn’t much care for the “spirited away” part as much as the “freedom” aspect of the story. The princess looked so blissful as her long, curling blonde hair swirled in the sea currents and her arms were thrown back behind her with her head tipped back in unrestrained laughs of glee. Shirahoshi mimicked the motion with a big grin, but no happiness bubbled up inside her chest.

Despondently, Shirahoshi dropped her arms and glanced out of the teeny-tiny window of her tall tower bedroom. She had not even the opportunity to gaze upon the picturesque landscape of the underwater kingdom, for a large window presented too large of a threat upon her life according to her father. The window still afforded plenty of opportunity, however; just this morning the brickwork and the tile floor had been repaired after a double-bladed axe had plowed through it, splintering everything asunder and missing Shirahoshi by a hair. She closed the book and swam over to the window, daring to peek ever-so-slightly through the paned glass.

The city spread out underneath her, twinkling with hundreds of lights as the citizens enjoyed their calm evenings. Beyond the collection of white-stone buildings, the undersea mountains rolled against the horizon. Her eyes widened slightly as she imagined herself galloping over their rocky expanses on the back of a golden seahorse, her pink hair rippling in the waves and her laughter ringing in the great blue expanse.

Sighing deeply, she laid her cheek on her arm and stared yearningly at the wild blue yonder. Maybe someday, her fairy tale would come true and she could spirit herself away far, far beyond this miserable tower.


	7. Peace

Vivi’s fingers swirled through the cool oasis waters as she lounged beneath the shady palm tree. Half a coconut was situated on her lap, the aroma of its succulent flesh and refreshing juice wafting pleasantly along the sand-spritzed wind. It danced alongside the joyful laughter of children and loud splashing on the breeze. Vivi had a serene smile on her lips as she watched them playing in the shallows of the desert spring, tickling one another with discarded palm leaves and spattering one another with the crystal-clear waters.

The oasis had been unearthed just outside of Alubarna, and so it was a favorited destination for the city’s children. Vivi often ventured down to its shores to watch them in their revelry, as it had been some time since she had seen such blissful expressions on her citizen’s faces. She wanted to ingrain them into her memory for all time, as a reminder that she needed to preserve those carefree giggles. That was her duty, as princess of Alabasta, to create a peaceful country for the next generation.

Her eyes were lidded as they traced their fervent circuits through the oasis waters. Suddenly, they widened as one of the children came wading up to her.

“Your Highness! Would you like to play with us?” he inquired hopefully. Vivi immediately shed her cloak and hiked up her skirts to stride into the water, relishing the coolness that bloomed over her skin. Her dress billowed out around her like milk spreading through the rippling liquid. Giggling, she splashed the little girl that invited her and the child ran away with a delighted squeal. The smile on her round face was more radiant than the burning desert sun, and Vivi burned that image into her mind to treasure it always.

_Yes… I will protect this peace we have fought hard for, for the children to live their young lives in unending bliss._


	8. Faith

What is God? Conis wondered this for so very long under Eneru’s torment. Someone in that situation may forsake the idea of God entirely, but Conis didn’t. She realized that God was not a person at all, but a _force_ ; the force that brought the Straw Hats to the sky, the force that possessed her to lead her people to salvation, the force of a golden bell heralding a victorious morning. God was hope and courage and compassion in its rawest form, placing power within the people’s hands. So Conis held hers out to take God’s offerings, and became _faith_. 


	9. A Worthy Endeavor

Vivi’s mouth watered as she admired the piping-hot steamed red bean bun in her hands. Its bronzed surface gleamed as the desert sun struck the butter coating its perfectly round surface. She peeled the napkin further down to ensure she wouldn’t get a mouthful of the thin paper with her lovely treat, then, without further ado, chomped down on the bun.

The way the soft bread and savory bean paste melted over her tongue drew a contented hum from her throat. As she pulled back, the gooey dough stretched and stretched until relenting to her tugging teeth. She chewed the roll appreciatively before shooting Pell a beaming smile.

“Thank you! It’s delicious!” He seemed very pleased with the young princess’ gratitude and bowed low. Vivi resumed devouring her bun with relish, while her brown eyes swiveled back and forth to absorb every aspect of the Alubarnan marketplace.

Vivi’s eager steps faltered to a halt as her eyes swept over a narrow alley. In the tiny little crevice, an old man was kneeling on a ragged, tattered blanket. It could have been purple once, but from all the dirt it had absorbed, it was now an ugly grey-lavender. His skin was wrinkly and bronze from decades of toil beneath the unforgiving desert sun. In his gnarled, quivering hands, he held a cardboard sign simply reading “Starving.”

Vivi glanced down at the half-finished red bean bun in her hand. It really was delectable. Still, without so much of a selfish thought, she scampered over to the elderly man and offered it to him. “Here. I ate half of it, but I hope this will fill your belly.” His voice was raspy as he thanked her, and fat salty tears leaked from his squinting eyes. Vivi smiled radiantly when he took a delicate bite of it and hummed in satisfaction.

“That was kind of you, Princess,” Pell remarked when she rejoined him.

“Pell?”

“Yes?”

“I want to build a country where no one goes hungry.”

“That is a very worthy endeavor, Princess,” he smiled proudly at her. “A very worthy endeavor indeed.” 


	10. The Boundless Blue

The hull of the ship groaned as it was rocked gently back and forth by the sloshing waves. The grassy deck of the _Thousand Sunny_ kissed Robin’s bare feet as she stole across the ship. The curious stars and inquisitive moon watched her attentively as she mounted the steps leading to the stern. She hailed a contented sigh as she draped herself over the railing, smiling delicately as her purple-blue eyes beheld the frothing wake streaming from the _Sunny’s_ tail. She laid her cheek on her forearms and just gazed, mystified by the sapphire blue of the ocean at night.

The endless blue had always calmed her, ever since she was a child. There was just _something_ about the infinite expanse. Its sprawl embraced her like a warm blanket, cool and calming. The limitless span of gently rolling waves just seemed to sweep all her troubles away, making them seem small and minuscule. Robin could always count on the beautiful blue ocean to calm her racing mind, whether it be the deep dark of night or the height of the day.

Her fingers traced the grain of the wood beam in time with the crashing waves. The ocean was a wonderful shade of indigo tonight, illuminated by the splendid full moon. As her eyes beheld the ocean, she could already feel the shadowy fingers of nightmares slipping from her mind, allowing her muscles to finally relax and the goosebumps to fall from her skin. She allowed herself to grow lost in the boundless blue sea, and for just a little while, pretended that nothing bad could ever touch her again.


	11. Glory

Rebecca basked in the gloom, illuminated only by a pair of crackling braziers mounted on the sandstone walls. She sat patiently in the rickety wooden chair with her sword laid across her lap, eyes closed. The small square room was isolated from the outside world, yet she could hear the coliseum crowd howling in the distance, baying for blood and death. She cracked her eyes open to peer into the silver blade across her lap.

Her reflection peeked back at her, stone-faced yet rosy with the flush of youth. Rebecca ought to be prancing through a field of wildflowers, laughing gleefully and dancing in the wind-tossed petals- not scrabbling through blood-soaked sand and stone fighting for her life. Yet, here she was, deep in the bowels of the mighty structure awaiting her turn for fame and glory.

Rebecca knew not what glory lie in murdering others, but she would be given glory for it, all the same.

The firelight reflected on the surface of the sword, making it shine with an almost unearthly light. The crackling glow reddened her cheeks like a puddle of blood stained her face. In a sense, it was; every inch of her skin had been watered with the iron liquid, soaking it up like grass did water. Rebecca was nourished and tempered by the blood of enemies, and had become what she held- a _sword_ , meant only to maim and kill.

The crowd roared with such intensity that the room trembled, raining grainy dust down on the gladiator. Light spilled into the small room as the iron gate began to creak open and the attendants dragged a limp, bleeding body through. Rebecca rose, stepping over the blood smear to mount the ramp to the arena. Sword raised, she prepared for her _glory_.


End file.
